When Newark rioted in ‘67, Nippy then 4-years old, was carted off to East Orange, a middle-class town in New Jersey. As a teen she attended Mount Saint Dominic Academy, a Catholic girls high school in Caldwell, New Jersey where she met Robyn Crawford, her first and only true love.

In another era, in a different world, they might have lived happily ever after; certainly they were a fixture around Gotham in the late ‘80’s and early 90’s when I moved there, dating and eventually marrying Karen Alexander, a model who shared layouts with Nippy in Seventeen and other magazines, before they both moved on to greater things.

The first time I heard Nippy sing was on a sparse, spontaneous, and completely unexpected cover of Hugh (Soft Machine) Hopper’s “Memories” by Bill Laswell’s group Material. The production, which sets Nippy’s soaring, breathy vocals against Archie Shepp’s soaring, breathy sax, sounds as fresh and relevant today as the day it was born. Robert Christgau called it right in the Village Voice when he anointed it "one of the most gorgeous ballads you've ever heard."

Legendary recording executive, Clive Davis, “discovered” Nippy singing with Cissy in the Sweet Waters Club in Manhattan in 1983, and signed her to a long-term contract with Arista Records. It took two years to record her first album, Whitney Houston, but it was worth the wait as the album spawned massive hits like “You Give Good Love”, “Saving All My Love for You”, and “the Greatest Love of All”. The accompanying music videos neatly bubble-wrapped Nippy in a fresh-faced, girl-meets-boy image that was as far-fetched as it was fetching, but succeeded in delivering mass-market success. In other words Nippy appealed to white people. In fact, according to a lot of white people I met at the time, Nippy was “Pretty like a White Girl,’ which is apparently a higher state of prettiness.

1987's Whitney contained four US No 1 singles: “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”, “Didn’t We Almost Have it All”, "So Emotional", and “Where Do Broken Hearts Go,” but though she won the Grammy for best female pop vocal performance for “I Wanna Dance With Somebody”, she was again overlooked in the R&B categories. It was apparent that in packaging Whitney for the mass market, Clive & Co. had begun to alienate the base. Things got so bad that when “Where Do Broken Hearts Go” was announced as one of the nominees for best single by a female at the 1989 Soul Train Awards, the audience booed.

Over the next few years the struggle to define Nippy became intense. Urban legend has it that Cissy begged Nippy to give up Robyn, telling her at one point that it was “better to be dead than gay”; which, in the cold light of history, comes horrifically close to prophesy.

In 1991, in a somewhat transparent attempt to engage African Americans, Nippy recorded “I'm Your Baby Tonight”with R&B producers Babyface and LA Reid. The sound was tougher, more urban, which is music industry parlance for black, but although the album went 4x platinum in the US, its sales were disappointing internationally. Nippy didn’t release another solo album for 8-years.

On January 27, 1991 at Super Bowl XXV, 10 days into the Gulf War, Nippy transformed the "The Star Spangled Banner" from an anachronistic waltz to a beat-driven 4/4, gospel infused smash in front of 73,813 fans, 115 million viewers in the US, and a worldwide television audience of 750 million.

That the performance, which is widely considered to be the greatest performance of Francis Scott Key’s patriotic ditty, ever happened at all is a story in itself. NFL executives, petrified that Nippy’s interpretation was “too funky for wartime… sacrilegious” ordered Bob Best, the Super Bowl's pregame show producer, to phone her to ask that she record a tamer version. Posterity suggests that her answer was no!

The night Nippy stopped the world was also the night that Cissy finally vanquished Robyn Crawford; jumping into the middle of a Nippy/Robyn altercation, and knocking Robyn to the ground, where she pounded her with fists and feet yelling, ‘I’ll kill you, you stupid bitch!’ This time Nippy didn’t come to Robyn’s rescue, and instead she reached for someone that might fit Cissy, Clive, and the market’s expectations of her. With little experience of men to draw on, she chose badly, and on July 18th, 1992 Nippy married Bobby Brown, the crass, bad-boy lead vocalist of New Edition, who had been courting her since 1989. It was a marriage of convenience - he got her luster to burnish a fading career and she got straighter and blacker in an instant.

Nippy’s first film role, as a singer stalked by a fan in The Bodyguard, confirmed her miraculous straightening. The movie, which was released on November 25th, 1992 went on to become the 7th highest grossing movie of the year, despite the lack of chemistry between Nippy and her bodyguard, Kevin Costner, powered by Nippy’s cover of Dolly’s “I Will Always Love You” and a soundtrack that sold 42 Million units and is the bestselling soundtrack of all time.

The March 4, 1993 birth of their daughter Bobbi Kristina should have sealed the mass-appeal deal, but instead to dull the pain of living a life that was not her own, of loving a woman and yet being married and yes having sex with a man, Nippy turned the bathroom in her mansion into a crack-house, where she smoked away her teeth (resulting in $6,000 dentures she constantly misplaced). She was incontinent and wore a nappy. She was so paranoid she bored a hole in the wall to spy on callers.

So given that Obama has a full set of teeth, doesn’t wear a nappy, and gets the CIA to act on his paranoia, why are they so often mentioned in the same breath? Take these posts on the Fox News comment thread attached to the news story of Whitney Houston’s death as a frightening and incomplete sample:

I am now patiently waiting for the grand messiah Obama to have a blk fundraiser in honor of Whitley with Kevin Costner as guest of honor with all the Hollywood elites invited along with Alan Colmes, Al Sharpton, Jeremia Wright, Charles Rangel, etc. with a menu featuring blk eyed peas, grits, Imported Kobe steak, Dom Perignon, sweet potato pie and a mus lll im scarf as a momento of this great occasion. Of course the door prize will be an all expense paid trip to Kenya to visit the Obama tribe and birthplace of his ancestors while the American people still look for this imposter’s birth certificate in Hawaii

How many blk people have died from drugs including alcohol that have been in the sports and the entertainment industry or screwed up their married lives like Tiger Woods or worse, OJ Simpson !!! This is the same disease that got Obama voted into the White House

Story goes Obama sh0ved to much cr@ck up the wh0res @zz when he was going to sniiff it…

Woo Hoo One less obama voter

Bammy should not have given her crack from his personal stash!

B l a c k s have little to brag about about so they strut and crow about anything. The politically correct whites whine and cringe and try to be b l a c k themselves and identify with their “brothers”. Great singer but as stupid as her pal, the malignancy in the white house

she still be voting for the head niggg this nov

To bad it wasnt the monkey in the White House

Nippy and Obama are connected by their genius with words and their ability to communicate and make relevant broad concepts like love, loss, inequality, and hope, but they were accepted in-spite of their race, and only so long as they behave, sing, and make decisions within tightly defined parameters. Straight and approximating to white Nippy was America’s sweetheart, while Obama is acceptable only in his impotence and not as a man.

June 30, 2012

Whitney Houston, a/k/a "Nippy", shimmering in a pencil thin white dress, opened the 1989 Grammy Awards with a performance of the pop-ballad One Moment in Time that mesmerizes me.

She starts out cautiously, hitting notes down the middle, sticking faithfully to the melody of a song that is saved from slush by the precision of her diction. Nippy wants us to understand that these are deeply personal truths.

The first clue to the magic to come is the steely certainty she brings to “… my finest day is yet unknown,” which from a place way beyondoptimism. A dismissive flick of the wrist marks the ascent into the first chorus. It is one of a series of small gestures that forewarns the tale’s gravitas: “I rise and fall, yet through it all, this much remains, I’ve got one moment in time…”

Nippy takes a few tentative steps towards us, swaying gently from side to side, and wades into the first chorus. She breaks out of the melody for moment, readying herself for the inevitable race “with destiny”, before closing her eyes to step closer to “eternity” - bringing us gently back down to earth for the second verse.

A deep moan reminds us that Nippy started out as a soloist in the junior gospel choir of Newark’s New Hope Baptist church, and brings the church to the Shrine Auditorium and a CBS audience of millions. A gracious wave gathers us round her.

A finger pointed directly at us, lets us know that the story has become deeply personal, and in an instant the cautious searching of the first verse is replaced by a magnificent certainty. We don’t question the braggadocios of “I’ve lived to be, the very best…” because the evidence is plain to see.

An irony-laden snigger separates “I want it all,” from “no time for less”. It marks the point of no return – she’s going for it all on this glorious night, tomorrow and caution, be damned.

Nipping effortlessly in and out of falsetto as she approaches the second chorus, the pace of her delivery seems to quicken. It’s a grand illusion as she is living, as all truly great singers must, at the back of the beat. Soaring through “eternity” to the bridge, she jabs a finger at us accusingly (as if she knew then that we would abandon her later), and holds on to her “one moment in time to make it shine” for dear life.

Assisted by a key-change that pushes her into the upper-reaches of her range, and wrapped in joy, Nippy goes off over the final chorus, delivering note after improbable note, cheered on by an audience that knows it is witnessing greatness. When she accidently and momentarily pulls the mic down to her waist, we witness the startling reality of her voice acapella.

She ends the performance holding “I will be free,” full voice, through a standing ovation that might have gone on forever were it not for the constraints of a live network TV broadcast, because we loved her then – or did we?

The tragedy of Nappy’s life is that she was never free to be Nippy. The tragedy of her death is that she is vilified and remembered more for her addiction that her greatness.

It's taken the shock of Nippy’s death in a tub for me to work out why people who let their kids listen to Rihanna-beating Chris Brown, and brag record collections that include classics recorded by junkies and pedophiles, have so much Whitney-hate – it’s pitiful reactionary story of race, Obama, and what it takes to build a mass-market brand in America.

April 02, 2012

Sometime shortly after the turn of the Millennium an aspiring exec at Beef Products Inc. found a new use for the sinewy bloody effluvia and bits of fatty waste that beef processing left behind, which (as fat is a breeding ground for bacterial contamination and wouldn't pass inspection) had previously been reserved for pets. By liquifying it in huge spinning centrifuges and then drowning it in ammonia (to kill the E-Coli and other contaminants) the Company invented a 'boneless lean beef’ mash which Jamie Oliver recently immortalized as ‘Pink Slime’, which is then frozen into small squares and sold as an additive to minced beef at $3.09 per pound, a far higher price than afforded to dog food.

The Company’s contention, that ammonia "is naturally present in all proteins… essential for life" and therefore safe, is disingenuous. In fact, ammonia is highly irritating to the eyes and respiratory tract and causes swelling and narrowing of the throat and bronchi, often triggering pulmonary edema and leading to airway obstruction. Prolonged skin contact (a few minutes) with ammonia causes burns - nice!

Beef Products marketed its "shit from Shinola" aggressively, abetted by the FDA and USDA who inexplicably exempted the production of Pink Slime from regular inspection (perhaps considering it a non-food product). In fact Pink Slime became so ubiquitous that it was (until recently) in 70% of all hamburgers sold in the US, including those sold at McDonalds, Burger King, and served in the vast majority of school lunches.

Last Monday, in response to public outrage, the Company announced that it would suspend slime manufacture at 3 of its 4 plants, reducing production by 900,000 pounds a day. By the end of last week the Company was on the counter attack, aided by 3 stooges - Governors “Thick” Perry of Texas, Sam “Throwback” of Kansas, and Terry “Brain-dead” of Iowa, who toured its South Sioux City, Nebraska plant on a “fact finding” tour and commented:

"They've [the poor buggers] been a victim of a smear campaign, and I think we need to do all we can to try to counter this.”

Thankfully this brazenly self-serving display of solidarity is too little too late, as McDonalds, the world biggest user of Pink Slime, has already moved on, having issued this deliciously self-serving statement:

“At McDonalds, the quality and safety of the food we serve our customers is a top priority. At the beginning of 2011, we made a decision to discontinue the use of ammonia-treated beef in our hamburgers. This product has been out of our supply chain since August of last year. This decision was a result of our efforts to align our global standards for how we source beef around the world.”

Actually food cost is McDonalds highest priority, and it was to reduce these costs that it sold burgers containing a product that is not fit for human consumption - one that is banned in Canada, the UK, and most of the rest of the civilized world.

McDonalds uses about a billion pounds of beef a year and slime-less ground costs 3-25 cents more per pound (depending on who is doing the math and the power of the purchaser). Guesstimating the additional cost of slime-less ground to McDonalds at 10 cents per pound, the decision to nix it will cost the company $100 million in the unlikely event it can’t find a way to pass the cost onto its customers (7.5 cents additional for a Quarter Pounder given a 33% food cost).

So yet again the question bounces back to us - is fast food to be relatively inexpensive because it is produced efficiently, or cheap because it is made of inferior ingredients? And given that we have been reminded (again) of just how low big food is prepared to go to produce cheap food, how much are we prepared to pay and do to de-junk it?

April 22, 2010

KFC set a high bar in Corporate Social Irresponsibility with the introduction of the new KFC Double Down Chicken Sandwich, a nutrition bomb made of two boneless white fried or grilled chicken filets (the bun re-imagined), two pieces of bacon, two melted slices of Monterey Jack and pepper jack cheese and the Colonel's secret Sauce.

The fried edition weighs in at 540 calories, 32 grams of fat and 1,380 milligrams of sodium. Miraculously its 460 calorie grilled twin contains even more sodium - 1,430 milligrams of it. Crazy when you consider that the recommended daily dose of sodium for American is 2400 milligrams, while a Brit is supposed to get by with 1600 milligrams – only sane if compared to Burger King’s Tendercrisp Bacon Cheddar Ranch Sandwich, with its 990 Calories, 58 grams of fat, and, 2190 milligrams of sodium.

Not wanting to be bested in the Fast-food Nation Corporate Social Irresponsibility table the Board of Directors of McDonald’s recommended earlier this week that the Company’s shareholders vote against the Humane Society’s modest proposal that 5% of the eggs purchased for its restaurants in the United States be the cage-free (the other 95% would still get to live in letter-paper sized filth).

In justifying its decision the McDonald’s board dropped science: “As we have examined this issue over the years, we have determined that there is no agreement in the global scientific community about how to balance the advantages and disadvantages of laying hen housing systems,” said its proxy statement.

What the McDonalds Board meant to say was that cage-free organic eggs are almost twice as expensive as the caged variety, because the huge environmental costs of factory farming (in poisoned well water, soil destruction and air pollution) are not paid by MacDonald’s, just as KFC off-loads the high cost of its sodium-witches (in heart disease, high blood pressure, and Osteoporosis) on our national health.

March 28, 2010

Haiti is on our collective minds - for now. There is a generosity to our spirit – for now. We implore each other to help Haiti recover from tragedy in numbers of new virally compassionate, socially networked ways that remind us repeatedly and tragically that Haiti is by far the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere, ravaged by terminal despair.

We are reassured that fleets of C13O cargo planes are on the way with essential supplies to feed the hungry, mend the broken, and shelter the homeless, and that we have done our part to dull if not cure the pain.

Eventually, the bodies that litter the streets will be buried and over time the normalcy that is Haitian poverty will return, unless we transform our international trade.

In the 1750’s Haiti was responsible for more than 50 percent of the GNP of France.In 2009, Haiti’s total GDP was $6.95 Billion, roughly 1 percent of the investment made in staving off a U.S. depression through TARP spending. Haiti’s economy shrank 49 percent on a per-person basis between 1980 and 2004, when GDP hit bottom at $402 per-person. The 2008 figure was $410. According to the World Bank, 54 percent of Haitians earn less than $1 a day and 78 percent less than $2.

Agricultural subsidies paid to growers in the U.S. and other developed nations are the primary cause of Haiti’s poverty, which has been compounded by corruption, deforestation, low-wage exploitation, and meddling with the food supply in the name of progress. The global substitution of subsidized high-fructose corn syrup for sugarcane annihilated Haitian sugarcane producers whose production costs were three times the reduced market price, and exports dropped from 19,200 tons in 1980 to 6,500 tons in 1987. In the past decade, there have been years that Haiti exported no sugar at all. Unable to compete with subsidized U.S., Columbian, and Brazilian growers, coffee production slumped from 42,900 tons in 1980 to less than 25,000 tons in 2005, devastating the more than 1 million Haitians who participate in the industry as growers, marketers, or exporters. Haitian producers of cacao, sisal, essential oils, cotton and even mangoes are similarly unable to compete.

Poverty causes unnatural disasters and makes of natural disasters the apocalypse – buildings collapse because they are improperly built out of substandard materials; mud slides because open-cast miners and people searching for fuel clear forests; and those lucky enough to survive the initial shock may die as a consequence of inadequate medical care.

So, as you reach into your pockets to help Haiti (as we must), realize that you are not “giving” at all; you are just paying the rest of the tab for the beans in your coffee, the high fructose corn syrup in your soda, and the mangoes and soy protein in your power-juice.

For as surely as cheap oil causes smog and cheap calories cause obesity, Haitian misery is a consequence of our subsidized lifestyle. The solution for Haiti is, as it is for the world, that we pay fair trade prices that reflect the real costs of products once their environmental and social costs have been factored in.

It’s everywhere - a single 12 oz can of cola has up to 13 teespoons of sugar, most of it fructose from High Fructose Corn Syrup ["HFCS"].

There is HFCS hidden in almost all fast food and in processed products like ketchup, baked beans, candies, yeast breads, sweetened yogurt, baby food, ketchup, cookies, beer, chicken nuggets, tropical fruit drinks, relish, cookies, and substituted for fat in foods like mayo and salad dressings, which are then labeled diet foods.

HFCS is everywhere because it’s artificially much cheaper than sugar, and that’s because every farm bill since 1938 has subsidized and therefore encouraged the over-production of corn.

The problem is that HFCS is an unnatural born killer; consuming unsustainable amounts of water, and more fertilizer than any other crop, which the bleeds from rivers to the sea, creating huge oxygen starved dead zones like the one at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico.

It kills us more directly - When HFCS is ingested, it travels straight to the liver which turns the it into fat, BUT unlike other carbohydrates HFCS does not cause the pancreas to produce insulin; which acts as a hunger quenching signal to the brain. So we get stuck in a vicious cycle, eating food that gets immediately stored as fat and yet never feeling full.

In 1970 the average American consumed less than ½ a pound of HFSC a year, today the average is more than 60-pounds (100 pounds or more in poor communities) during which time obesity has quadrupled along with incidence of diabetes and heart disease and many forms of cancer, which in turn has fueled rocketing healthcare costs.

The cure is simple and it does not involve any further expensive scientific research, medication or invention – corn subsidies have to go, replaced by subsidies that encourage crop diversity and HFSC should be banned immediately from products for which natural substitutes exists.

October 17, 2008

Over
the past two weeks the Dow Jones Industrial Average has fallen to mid-80's levels: during the past two
decades there have been peaks and troughs and booms and busts in which money
was made by a few, but the Many (the 50% of all U.S. households that own
stocks, either directly or in a mutual fund or retirement plan) would
have been better off buying art, wine, raw materials, bonds, leaving their
money in Money Market accounts (even after accounting for inflation), or
stuffing shoe-boxes with bills, than investing in the stock of public
companies.

The
phenomenon is even more pronounced in the US where a the dollar, ravaged by deficits - the product of war, over-consumption and fossil fuel addiction - has devalued investments in US equities relative to those of our
competitors, and our relative wealth.

The
recent sell-off has been so virulent that it is tempting to wonder if stocks
are now cheap. It more probable that we are seeing a
fundamental reappraisal of the value and utility of equities, and that
stocks and stock markets will never regain their former place as the prime
enablers of capital.

Over
the past two decades public corporations have become empire-sized and their
executives became despots, less and less answerable to their shareholders. The
consequence of this lack of oversight is that much of the value that had
previously flowed to corporations balance sheets, has been transferred to a new
executive ruling class as “results based” compensation, or lassoed by financial
engineers as a reward for inventing sophisticated off-balance sheet financial
instruments that created the perception of profit and further enhanced
executive class compensation at the Many's expense.

The
reality is that the ordinary shareholder is now so far from the trough that
investing in stocks has, for the Many, become a mugs game. Certainly the
wealthy ran from owning ordinary shares (and funds invested in ordinary shares)
many years ago, choosing instead to invest in hedge-funds, or opportunistic Buffetian
purchases of preferred stocks with that further distance ordinary
shareholders from return on their investments.

From
their media exposure to greed orgies lat Enron, Computer Associates, Sunbeam,
WorldCom, Adelphia and Tyco, the Many knew that they were getting the crumbs,
but persevered because a 401k promised a better return than a Money Market fund
and seemed safe enough.

The
lesson learned is that there is nothing safe or free about a barely regulated
market except that the influencers of the market are free to take whatever
return they can justify to themselves. Lehman boss Dick Fuld snatched $485m in salary, bonuses and
options between 2000 and 2007. Last year Merrill Lynch chairman Stan
O'Neal retired after announcing losses of $8bn, grabbing $161m as he walked out the door. This year bankers at Wall Street's top 6 firms will (unless we protest loudly) receive
pay and bonuses worth more than $70bn,despite their starring role in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression.

The
illusion of safety destroyed; and having seen their life savings decimated
(along with their hopes that their children and their children’s children will
live richer more prosperous lives than they) by events way beyond their
control, the Many are heading for the exits - shareholders took $43.5 billion
from stock funds last month and an additional $49.3 billion last week.
Severely bitten, and in spite of the occasional mammoth upside leap, they will
not easily come back.

The
irony of the economic meltdown is that the US government, having created a
trillion dollar Sovereign Triage Fund, is now scrambling to buy the very stocks
that the Many off-loaded: deliriously inverting the Sovereign Wealth model
where cash-rich developing nations such as Singapore and China purchase
(supposedly) high-quality global assets for the benefit of their citizens, and
creating ever greater jeopardy by nationalizing the market's failures in the
hope that this will save the whole.

The
socialization of risk can only work if it is accompanied by offsetting
regulation and socialization of reward; otherwise the unfortunate result will
be a Soviet-style model that benefits only government bureaucrats (Treasury Secretary, Henry
Paulson’s swapping two years of service for a $200 Million tax break on selling his Goldman stock being a
particularly egregious leap in the wrong direction). Essential steps to a fair
and efficient market are:

Limiting
executive compensation to X [say the salary of the President] plus a percentage of annual profits

Restricting
public companies to one class of stock

Setting
statutory debt/capital ratios that apply beyond banking and finance to every
public enterprise

Finite limits on investment fund leverage [to prevent deleveraging disasters such as the one we are experiencing now]

Restricting the marketing or sale of any debt or equity instrument for which there is no
established exchange or market [designed to foster liquidity and the
development of new markets rather than discourage innovation]

Taxing
retained wealth through higher taxes on property, dividends etc., to
offset the inequitable distribution of the past two decades

Securities regulation and oversight of all major financial institutions by a Global Authority [simply recognizing the reality that finance is now and forever more a globally interconnected business].

Even
then, investment in stocks and stock markets will never be predictable or safe
and the Many should be discouraged from placing their retirement and life
savings in the markets directly. They should instead be offered government debt promising a predictable return

This will inevitably
lead to a smaller public equity sector and an enormous pool of state capital
(the sum total of our retirement and savings), that must then be invested by the best asset managers almost infinite money can buy, in industries of strategic importance to the Many
(infrastructure, sustainable energy, healthcare, and food production);
investments without which we will surely lose our prosperity and our beneficial
place in the world

May 22, 2007

Until recently I was the Chief Executive Officer of Urban Box Office. Inc., [“UBO”], a record label that vigorously stirred the melting-pot and ruffled George W. Bush’s feathers, when, in April of 2006 it released “Nuestro Himno”, an all-star recording of the Star Spangled Banner, in Spanish, and in solidarity with undocumented immigrants. Prior to founding UBO, I produced records, managed artists, supervised movie scores, executive-produced movie soundtracks, and worked as a bouncer at punk concerts, having started out making tea for pop-stars at a recording studio in central London.

Obscured by the hysteria accompanying Nuestro Himno’s release was that UBO had become a successful independent record label, with a unique business model, which was described by Ethan Smith in the Wall Street Journal as follows:

"UBO, as the label is known, relies on low prices, direct contact with potential customers and an ad-hoc distribution network reaching thousands of neighborhood stores -- including bodegas, gas stations and hair salons -- that many music companies either ignore or cede to middlemen"

Music retailers’ response to our effort to reduce the price of CDs was to gouge. We often found our CDs (which wholesaled at $6.00 in the expectation they would be sold for under $10) on their shelves priced at $12.99, $15.99, even $20 or more. The gouging jeopardized our business model and our relationships with artists who complained that we were subsidizing retailers, by reducing value of their share of net revenues.

Worse, we discovered that some retailers were bootlegging our products – a practice prevalent in Latin music retail that rips off record companies, consumers and artists for the sole benefit of the retailers, for whom each sale becomes an untaxed pure profit event.

Ripping-off artists has always been absurdly easy in the record business, as artists are reluctant to offend the grand egos they hope will market them to superstardom, and are invariably represented by managers, agents and attorney’s that are too indebted to the great egos to put up much more than the semblance of a fight, and whose concept of a Chinese wall is an entree at Mr. Chows.

Without oversight, successive generations of executives have over-marketed albums to gain market share, chart success, and personal glory (as did I), and then so under-priced those assets in their dealings with other media that they have not been left with sufficient capital leverage their content themselves.

Among the more delirious examples of record business largesse are; three decades of giving music videos away to broadcasters like MTV and BET, without sharing in the revenues from advertising inserted into the videos, channel subscriber fees, or taking an equity stake in the channels themselves; and enabling Apple to monopolize the digital distribution of music so completely that it determines pricing, availability, and the extent of its own competition.

A back-of-a-cracked-jewel-pack calculation of the transference of wealth from the major labels to Steve Jobs, Sumner Redstone and all that sail with them, looks like this:

On April 25th, 2007 Apple reported record quarterly profits of $770 Million, driven by sales of 10.5 million iPods. 15.6% of Apple’s $85 Billion market cap is derived from iTunes, 22.8% from the iPod, worth a combined $35 Billion; Viacom’s music channels contribute half of MTV Networks free cash flow and are worth another $10 Billion or so. Given Warner Music Group’s 13% global market share and $2.55 Billion market cap, the current value of the global record business is less than $20 Billion – less than half that of the Apple and Viacom music interests, built leveraging its content.

Compounding the industry’s problems is that music is not as essential it was. In London, in the late 70’s, it was the primary expression of our tribal and life-style affiliations. ‘Soul boys’ listened to R&B, ‘skinheads’ to ska, ‘punks’ to near-music, ‘metal-heads’ to hard rock, and every weekend I would hang out at import shops listening to the latest reggae pre-release, before taking the best home and spinning them in solitude, in Hi-Fi, on my stereo system!

I don’t know anybody who listens to music like that anymore, certainly not my daughters or their friends, who graze it while eating, reading and banging out blogs. Music, once a recreational activity, has become the soundtrack to our lives, and the consequence of its new role is that we are never going to pay premium for it again.

So what to do?

The first step is to stop selling pre-recorded music CDs; they are absurdly expensive and taxing on the environment to manufacture and distribute, may be returned without penalty, contain ‘filler’ to justify their unjustifiable (in a digital world) price, and are for retailers, mobsters, street-entrepreneurs and consumers alike, the perfect bootlegging device.

The second step is to push all music online without copy protection having forced Apple (as a proxy for all of the manufacturers of digital players and keepers of proprietary online digital music stores) to:

License iTunes (on a similar royalty basis to that paid the inventors of the CD) to anyone wanting to open a digital music store, encouraging real world competition on price, service, selection, and user experience, and interfacing with a vast range of newly compatible devices.

Pay a royalty on every iPod sold. Currently, only 20 or so of the 400 songs on an average iPod are purchased, the rest are ripped (mostly from CDs). If each iPod were sold with the expectation that 600 songs would be ripped onto it in its lifetime, and a 10 cent royalty paid on each, the 40 ++ million MP3 players projected to ship in 2007 would generate $2 Billion plus, attributable almost directly to the bottom line - more than the 2006 profits of all the record companies combined. A $20 per unit payment in respect of the 100 million plus iPods already sold should generate an additional $2 Billion. (An iPod royalty is already paid by Apple in France and by Microsoft in respect to the Zune)

It will be argued that my proposal is too extreme, that CD sales, though declining, are still 90% of revenues and that as these revenues cannot possibly be replaced day one, the industry will be worse rather than better off without them. I counter by pointing out that CD sales (already barely profitable due to the high cost of manufacture and physical distribution) are declining precipitously, and no longer support specialist music retail, leaving the industry at the mercy of Wal-Mart loss leading and a spiraling downward trend; and that Apple will agree these terms, because without access to premium content, iTunes is Mp3.com with a few bells and whistles.

September 16, 2006

This, my second visit to Havana was more illustrative and unsettling than the first, a vacation with my daughters in 2004; perhaps because the city was on ‘lockdown’ in preparation for the meeting of the 116 members of the Non-Aligned Movement;an organization that lobbies for freer and more equitable world trade, and includes such exemplary free-thinking ‘independent’ states as Zimbabwe, Congo, Pakistan, Iran, and North Korea; perhaps because I was traveling with a Superstar Reggaeton DJ, whose perceptions and observations were constructed upon the firm foundation of an understanding both language and the culture; and certainly because Fidel Castro has become little more than a delusional tyrant who betrays the intelligence, ingenuity, pride, hope and dreams of his people 24/7/365

Our first experience of ‘lockdown‘ came minutes after we touched down on Cuban soil, when agents of the Interior Ministry, armed with Russian guns and power by proxy, approached us the customs area, separated us from the masses and then each other, and then played 20-questions. How and why had I accumulated so many stamps in my passport in such a short time? What was the purpose of my various visits to Turkey, Singapore, and in particular Israel? Why was I carrying so much cash (try using a credit card drawn on a US bank in Cuba)? They seemed to have half a notion that we were enemy agents with plans to embarrass Castro in front of his global cronies - as if any help were needed.

I told the first agent, and then a second, and then another more senior, plain-clothed big-dog that our visit was to celebrate the Superstar Reggaeton DJ’s birthday as well as experience Reggaeton, Cuban style. It took repetition for my shtick to stick; the big-dog just couldn’t quite belive that we could be interested in a street culture that the state, clinging to antiquity as if it were precious rather than dusty and irrelevant, forces underground.

By the time the big-dog handed us back our passports, apparently now comfortable that we offered no clear, or present, or rational danger to the glorious republic, the youngest of the agents, a baby-faced thug with huge damp patches under his armpits and over his chest, had engaged the superstar Reggaeton DJ in passionate cultural conversation – how did we think the local favorites Gente d’ Zona, stacked up against Reggaeton superstars like, Don Omar, Tego Calderon, Daddy Yankee, Wisn y Yandel and Ivy Queen?

The road from the airport to Havana is pot-holed and bellied, badly lit, and eerily devoid of commercial outdoors advertising. However, posters of Fidel and Che Guevara – the only pop star of revolution with truly global reach – abound. At major intersections, the headlights of matchbox-sized Soviet-era cop cars, peered inquisitively into a night otherwise backlit by a braggadocios, two-dimensional, golden, full moon. A light rain wandered onto the windshield where it was smeared by worn wiper blades, partially obscuring the psychedelic horizon and a pyrotechnic electrical storm.

Closing in on the city centre, we were flagged to a stop by a gaggle of cops with thick ticket-pads and sneering lop-sided snarls. Their contempt is inbred; like many absolute monarchs, Castro employs the sons and daughters of impoverished peasants to keep the lid on his cities, which they do enthusiastically, having no vested interest in the welfare of the people they police. According to the cops our driver had turned left without indicating. The cabbie explained that the bulb in the indicator light had blown and the dealer had not had a replacement part in stock. The cop shrugged his indifference to the cabbie and his excuse and wrote the ticket regardless, demanding that the $30 fine be paid on the spot.

The cabbie became dangerously indignant, pointing out loudly/virulently that many of the historic whips for which Havana is famous, pre-date indicators or require bulbs that are no longer manufactured or imported. We settled the matter by donating the fine, which seemed only fair, as a cabbie working for the state earns rice, beans, chicken, pork (no beef) milk, healthcare (provided by Venezuelans as the more experienced Cuban doctors are pimped to richer nations for hard currency, abroad), an education, housing of sorts, and around $7 bucks a week.

The next morning, in wet 33 degree heat, I led the Superstar Reggaeton DJ up El Malecon, a magnificent thoroughfare that skirts the Atlantic Ocean, from historic Havana (a massive restoration project waiting on regime change to gain real momentum) to Miramar, a wealthy, could be anywhere, enclave where Castro’s cronies live in Robb Report luxury, and fun loving foreigners with $250,000 or more burning a hole in their pockets, buy condos and over-populate near-chic restaurants and bars, where they ponder the miniscule differences between privilege in Cuba and privilege back home.

Wandering back to nowhere in particular and in absolutely no hurry at all, we window-shopped barren stores and gangster-posed next to a fabulous dark green Packard Super 8 in the late stages of a loving restoration. The Superstar Reggaeton DJ made much of being humbled; he had so much (we are talking S65AMG’s, Breitlings, and all things bling) and was unquestionably on the fast track to more, while they had so little – materially speaking. One could tell that the observation made him feel all warm and fuzzy inside, as one does when one has the protection of privilege against the ravages of the cruel world.

At one of many stands selling crude bootleg CDs, DVDs and games, I bought a Don Omar’s ‘King of Kings’ CD for $2. My plan was to bring it back to the RIAA as further proof that the global battle against piracy is lost, but as luck would have it we found ourselves walking in-step with 3 pretty, friendly, Don Omar fans who had more use for the CD than I.

We spent the rest of a glorious day with those girls in their world, drinking gently-mixed (rum, mint, lime, and sugar) Mojitos in a thin passageway decorated with magnificent if aging graffiti art, eating in Paladar, an illicit, unmarked, Casablanca styled and themed restaurant with Bogart-pics on the walls, where Cuban’s with black-market cash to spend may sample the 4-forbidden pleasures – lobster, beef, shrimp and privacy. 3 hours of rum and fun later, they took us home,

Home was on the fourth and top floor of a nondescript too-much-sand-in-the-mix, concrete building, sandwiched in between two glorious colonial buildings in sad disrepair. A tiny living room, furnished with a sagging twin bed and a worn couch, and decorated with offerings to various Santerian saints, led to a microscopic bedroom with fungus blackened damp concrete walls and a tiny picture window bragging a perfect view of the Malecon and the ocean beyond. To left of the bedroom was the only kitchen/bathroom combo I have ever seen anywhere. On the stove was a Castro pressure cooker; one of 100,000 distributed to Cubans every month, essential weapons in Castro's latest battle to reassert control over the nation's economy.

The distribution was designed to "do away with the rustic kitchen," Castro had told the Federation of Cuban Women, boasting that the new cookers would use half the energy of the homemade ones they’d replaced, thereby helping to lessen Cuba’s dependence on foreign oil. It went unsaid that the distribution would destroy the thriving business of manufacturing the cookers from imported molds, one of Cuba’s few successful and legal private enterprises.

Two of the three girls, Jessie, the pretty twin of a rare Eastern Panther, and Glevis lived in that apartment with their grandmother and a scrawny cat. The third, Uleisi, ‘the quiet one’ lived a couple of doors down.

The most important thing in the apartment, apart from these extraordinarily women, was the TV, which was hooked up to an illegal dish on the roof, and broadcast our news, our shows, our gossip, our commercials; our material dreams, in real time. And the girls were smitten, salivating to taste Sonic burgers, to try Big Macs, to ride Batman & Robin, to fall into the Gap, to wear Chanel, paint their nails and the town with Revlon, and listen to Reggaeton, the urban Latin soundtrack to post hip hop consumption.

Once upon a time, in states such the old Soviet Union and apartheid South Africa, the government did a pretty good job of isolating the people from the world. This is not the case in Cuba. Cubans see us and they see themselves through our eyes, and they cannot believe that we are so unsophisticated that we cannot understand that it is possible for them to be proud of their country and yet want to experience our material good fortune -without becoming obese (phat not fat). And while they do desperately want Castro to go, they aren’t quite ready to push him because they do still respect and revere his contribution to their unique identity and their pride, and because they have been babied to the point they are scared to face our seemingly unfreindly world without him.

The evening came and the boardwalk that runs along the Malecon, lit as it was by a full omnipresent moon, beckoned. I crossed the road first, then the Superstar Reggaeton DJ. The girls did not follow, instead they huddled together on the city-side of the road, Confused, I waved them over, hoping that we could all kick-it perched on the sea wall, but they stayed put, waving us to come back.

A few increasingly desperate gestures later, we jaywalked back across the Malecon, but they walked quickly away. We followed them for a few hundred yards, without making an impression on their lead. Finally, they turned right into dark a side street, stopped, and waited. As we approached we saw that worry had replaced joy on their faces, and that they looked a decade older. Jessie explained that it was dangerous for them to be seen in the street with us after dark, as they might be arrested as whores (for fraternizing with the enemy, perhaps). At that very moment a leering cop with black beads for eyes strode up to Jessie, demanding to see her papers… She flicked a warning gaze at us, to move us on, and on we went, disprited, the bitter after-taste of apartheid fizzing on our lips.

We’d walked about a mile when we stumbled a dusty store crammed with pre-owned washing machines and a mountain of their spare parts. A sign above the store read:

“We buy used Russian washing machines in bad condition.”

We turned to each other and swapped the sardonic smiles of two people sharing the exact same irony; Castro had bought into some old discredited Soviet shit, repaired it, modified it, and improved on it with donated spare parts, such as buses from China, computers from France, power plants from Spain, and munitions from Russia. Only, it's lemon, it really doesn't work.